The Huston Smith Reader

Edited with an introduction by Jeffery PaineUniversity of California Press: 280 pp., $29.95

A restless curiosity about the sacred dimensions of life drove Huston Smith to seek enlightenment in a Zen monastery in Japan, join a secret Muslim fraternity, make pilgrimages to Himalayan holy sites and investigate the religious import of mind-altering plants.

These experiences also propelled Smith through six decades of scholarly analysis that has made him one of the world's most important writers and thinkers on religions of the world.

Today a new aspect of life absorbs the grand old man of comparative religion. Now living in a room in an assisted-living facility, the 93-year-old Smith has found himself making new friends in a community of senior citizens "in wheelchairs or depressed or withAlzheimer's." There too he ponders this question: What happens when we die?

His 15th book, "The Huston Smith Reader," is a great summing up of Smith's work over the last half-century, from passionate lectures and essays on why religion matters to deeply personal reflections on entering his ninth decade of life.

Taken together, these works offer a portrait of the author who, to describe the world's enduring faiths as accurately as possible, immersed himself in them, participating in their rituals and practices to get, as he put it, "an insider's view."

What is missing is only Huston's classic, "The World's Religions," an introductory college textbook that has sold more than 3 million copies. With few exceptions, the selections are eloquent and filled with anecdotes, character sketches and tales of wonder involving Masai warriors who rescued him from lions, a Japanese spiritual leader who confided the true meaning of Zen Buddhism, and Smith's own parents, evangelical Christians from whom he inherited an abiding trust in God.

In the 1950s, professor S.H. Nasr in Iran provided Smith with an insight that became an inspiring beacon over his long academic career: "Don't search for a single essence that pervades the world's religions. Recognize them as multiple expressions of the Absolute, which is indescribable."

It has been a remarkable life.

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Review: 'The Huston Smith Reader' surveys a remarkable life